Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Lochhead attended the Summer Art School at Queen's University in 1944.
He was commissioned to do two murals in his surrealist mode, one for the airport in Gander, Newfoundland, one for the Royal Canadian Legion branch in Regina (1955–1956), a "major artistic achievement".
[2] Lochhead was the co-founder with McKay of the Emma Lake Artist's Workshops in 1955 and attended the 1959 visit of Barnett Newman, followed by a reappraisal of his art.
In 1961, he exhibited his abstract paintings as part of the Regina Five at the National Gallery of Canada with Art McKay, Ron Bloore, Ted Godwin, and Douglas Morton.
He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts[5] In 2005, Ted Fraser curated the exhibition titled Kenneth Lochhead: Garden of Light for the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina.